Verbs Taking Clausal and Non-Finite Arguments as Signals of Modality - Revisiting the Issue of Meaning Grounded in Syntax

摘要

We revisit Levin's theory about the correspondence of verb meaning and syntaxand infer semantic classes from a large syntactic classification of more than600 German verbs taking clausal and non-finite arguments. Grasping the meaningcomponents of Levin-classes is known to be hard. We address this challenge bysetting up a multi-perspective semantic characterization of the inferredclasses. To this end, we link the inferred classes and their Englishtranslation to independently constructed semantic classes in three differentlexicons - the German wordnet GermaNet, VerbNet and FrameNet - and perform adetailed analysis and evaluation of the resulting German-English classification(available at www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/modality-verbclasses/).